February 27, 2014

I want a partner who feels free. I want a partner who knows they’re safe sharing their love, attractions & momentary flashes of lust with me; as well as the ensuing intimacy of knowing them that much better.

I want the chance to grow and overcome my fears. I want the understanding born of honest, granular communication. I want not to be complacent.

I want those I love to have all the joy and affection they might desire, in the forms which suit them best. I would like any partner’s life to be rich, full and vivid. And I want to be a catalyst, not constraint.

February 11, 2014

Be raised in a broken home, emotionally untended after age eleven. Have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep. Grow up through books and The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Know an anarchic liberty of thought. Turn inwards. Theorize and hunger in a vacuum.

Try marijuana and laugh. Try starving, cutting, lulling yourself into oblivion through trance music. Lack a context in which experience, harming none, can be deemed wrong. Try acid and lace the stars together. Discover the infinite varieties of gender, love and sex. Be overwhelmed by how a threesome is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, away from a couple. Dissolve the cultural norms surrounding love and monogamy. Grow.

Know thyself. Build a foundation of love, bravery and honesty. Throw up a scaffold of possibilities: how one may love, make love, be intimate. Mortar together with trusted friends. Trust yourself. Decide at last ‘the risk to remain tight in a bud…’ and that a partner you cannot be naked honest with is no kind of partner, no-one to get naked with. Strike out on your own.

Follow your heart. Allow your lusts. Know there is no shame among consenting adults. Take care of yourself.

Keep at it.

Return from Wonderland. Know now you’re part of the fabric of Wonderland, and can never return. Realize how impossibly fucking transgressive Wonderland is to most people, when to you it is just a broader language for connection.

October 5, 2013

Something I appreciate about polyamory is the grace (which can be) inherent in its practice. There are moments in a poly relationship where one is stung, or fearful. Especially so in a society which values monogamy and writes that into its songs and films, where the message that love is exclusivity is so prevalent it comes unbidden into our hearts and thoughts. Polyamorous folk are not, always, immune to jealousy and fear. The moment where you are struck by a painful emotion and elect not to let it drive you is I think a sort of grace, a bowing to the longer trajectory of joy or love or liberty.

Grace and the inner struggle to do it right, in the service of a greater thing, is deeply admirable in my eyes. The aesthetic and pragmatic converge in this trait: a set jaw, tomorrow’s lights lit.

March 21, 2011

She had the textural perfection of a phantom, even in flesh. Hard gems shone on her fingernails, and her soft skin was traced in Buddhist scripture. There is no fire like lust…

She was so pretty.

She made her husband a sandwich every day. My husband thinks you’re gorgeous, were her first words to me. I do not hold a candle to you, I replied. We had no chemistry. We came only as close as touched tongue-tips wrapped around her husband’s cock, or brushed fingers as we held him though the night.

Her bearing was enviable. I saw a video-camera ignore a roomful of salaciousness to focus on her, as she carried a glass of water across the room. That’s my girl, her husband said with pleasure and pride.

She cooked risotto and strawberry granita when I joined them at the table. She hit me when he asked, politely criticized my cunnilingus, and gave me a key to their loft. She seemed exemplary in all ways.

And he texts me, last autumn: we’ve decided to end it…

My brother became room-mate and partner, partner in crime, the man who asks how my day was each evening. It is very nice. His love is expressed sincerely and viscerally and thoughtfully.

Still I envy phantoms seen at enough distance to idealize, yet close-up enough to be taken by glances of them. I covet, senselessly, the man of faith who loved her; who was still possessed of unquiet passion.

I shift between beauty and clumsiness. I rarely cook. I frequently am at odds to the world. My nails are always chipped and broken. Though I’d like to be gracious, I am possessive and easily stung.

I am wise and beautiful and tough. I am earnest. I can hold my own, though when I doubt myself, I cannot hold anything.

Time runs along a knife-edge. I have very little faith in the best laid plans of mice and men, but I run with it.

There’s an image of us in the fractured mirror. Licking my come from your wedding ring will fuck with my head forever…

There’s a photograph of you, receiving her at the base of the stairs. She is on the lowest step, navel exposed in a casual shirt. You’re wearing a kilt. It’s summer.

There’s a photograph of you kissing her in the kitchen. It’s late afternoon. You’re almost silhouettes, grey; I can see the outline of your tongue, her hair, your shirt-pockets.

Leather, you said, and rope. But rings of metal are the everyday fetish object, a commonplace sick-puppy perversity of ownership and oath. They’re a fantasy of bondage. And it’s the sickest fantasy I have: sicker than drinking your piss, being beaten bloody, being pierced by five hundred feathered needles.